One of the first things people want to know when first visiting our chat rooms is how to type in color and how to do the goofy actions they see other people doing.

The silly actions are called "socials". When in chat, type .socials (or just .soc since most commands can be abbreviated) to see a list of them.

For instance, doing .rose Fawn results in:

  You give Fawn a lovely longstemmed --{-{-{@

Cute, huh?

You'll also see lots of people mixing bright colors into their sentences. This is easy to do once you learn a handful of "color codes". To switch to a particular color, type a | character followed by the code of the color as shown below.

Code	Color
b	Blue
B	Bright blue
f	Black (foreground)
F	Gray
g	Green
G	Bright green
m	Magenta
o	Orange
p	Purple
P	Pink
r	Red
R	Bright red
y	Yellow

For example, to print "I am embarrassed" all in red, type:
  |RI am embarrassed

Oh, and to actually show a | character (maybe to explain color stuff to someone online) you just type two of 'em in a row: ||. That's all there is to it.

The "dot commands" supported in chat are listed below. Note that you can abbreviate most commands, for instance, .ex works just as well as .exits.

.connect

Reconnect to the chat server. Used only when you've gotten disconnected for some reason.

.emote message

Allows you to appear to do an action. For example, if your screen name is Roger and you do:
    .emote blows bubbles
People will see:
    Roger blows bubbles

If you start the action with an apostrophe, it will allows you to do something like so:
    .emote 's face falls off
Which will display:
    Roger's face falls off

.exits

Displays a list of adjoining rooms. Use .go to move to one of these other rooms.

.go direction

Moves to the next room in the specified direction. Valids directions are north, south, east, west, up, and down, and can be abbreviated n, s, e, w, u, and d, respectively.

.gossip message

A more public way of "talking". Allows people in any of the non-private rooms to hear you.

.help

Display a summary of this information.

.look (direction)

Display a list people in the current room, or if an optional direction if provided, looks into the rooms in that direction (if it's non-private). Directions are the same as for .go.

.socials

Displays a list of socials. There changes fairly frequently, so we won't try to provide the list here. Note: if you have a good idea for a social, by all means, talk to the moderators about it.

.tell name

A private way of "talking". Only name can "hear" what you say. Often referred to in speech as dot teeing.

.who

Displays a list people in chat. If the list is long, you may need to type .more to see the rest of the list.

You can, of course, type .help at any in chat to get a list of the available commands.